What the GP is trying to point out is that current consumption of hydrocarbons is 400x the current capacity of the biosphere. Not only does bio not scale, your "100% bio" would produce only.0025% of current energy needs (and no, that is not a typo).
The remaining issue then is production - getting enough plants online to start making a dent in our fossil oil use.
Considering that current hydrocarbon consumption is 400x the current capacity of the biosphere to fix carbon, this is at best a very small dent.
The point of thermal depolymerization is waste disposal, not energy production. It simply doesn't scale to an energy supply. But as a way of turning fairly toxic agricultural waste (think pig farm "lagoons") it is a fabulous idea.
This confluence of optimal ocean and atmosphere conditions has been known to produce increased tropical storm activity in multi-decadal (approximately 20-30 year) cycles. Because of this, NOAA expects a continuation of above-normal seasons for another decade or perhaps longer. NOAA's research shows that this reoccurring cycle is the dominant climate factor that controls Atlantic hurricane activity. Any potentially weak signal associated with longer-term climate change appears to be a minor factor.
Storms and Global Warming II. Same here. A weak signal related to intensity is currently undergoing peer review.
I agree that it seems plausible, but there are a lot of factors influencing hurricane formation (e.g. wind shear keeps them from forming in the South Atlantic most of the time).
It is tempting to want Mother Nature to bash some sense into the right wingnuts in Florida, but I suspect that the melting of Greenland (which is happening faster than the models predict) will do that RSN.
Maybe Real Time 2030 will fret about how our college kids do little more than steal full-res holographic porn when they're not getting their financial identities stolen by cyber-jihadists eager to build more backpack nukes.
Sheesh, what a bunch of whiners.
"Kids these days are so lazy."
"Ooooh, scary hackers! We must be thinking!!"
"Ooooh, scary terrorists! We must be thinking even harder!!!"
If these guys want a better future, they should get off their collective butts, stop bullying the government and everybody else to give them a guaranteed return on their investments and do it themselves. I mean, isn't that their philosophy?
So its going to take time to reverse the trend of millenia. The question is, have we got that time?
The question is also: "Who is this 'we' you are talking about?" The Greenland icesheet is melting faster than the models predict. That is a 7 metre rise in sea level when it is all done. In the US, that will take out most of Florida and the Gulf coast (e.g. New Orleans) and maybe some of DC(!), but the country can probably absorb the change.
But the people who will really be hit badly by this are places like Bangladesh. Most of the world's population lives near sea level and a rise of this magnitude (which is already under way) would kill millions of people. Remember the tsunami last year? Indonesia has about 1 billion people. Imagine that the people who survived had nowhere to go and you are starting to get the magnitude of the problem.
A coal-burning plant produces more nuclear waste than does a nuke plant only during normal operation. That's ignoring the problem of decommissioning the plant after it becomes too old and too radioactive to maintain.
I would interpret the OPs comment to mean "dumps more radioactive waste into the environment in a completely uncontained manner." A decomissioned nuclear plant may be radioactive, but it is all in one place and easily contained. By contrast, a coal plant's radioactivity has been dumped into the atmosphere and who knows where it is. Probably in your lungs.
This also neglects the issue of "How much carbon does mankind produce" vs. "How much carbon does nature produce." (It may turn out that natural production of CO2, including volcanos, dwarf any human contribution).
Fortunately, this issue has been heavily studied and the answer is that human contributions dwarf natural production.
The research in that area ends up reporting different results depending on who is paying the scientist's bills. (And its easy to find criticism about scientific climate models and data collection methods.)
This is true for studies funded by the energy industries, but not for independent researchers. And if you think that independent researchers are "under pressure" to produce pro-warming results, then why are so many energy industry grants going begging? (And as for criticism being easy to find, criticism of just about anything is easy to find - insert your favorite conspiracy theory here. Intelligent criticism is much harder to come by.)
If global warming is due to CO2, there is the question of how much it costs to reduce CO2 emissions, and if that money could be better spent on other environmental causes.
Sure, these are policy/value questions. But consider that the consequences of global warming include rising sea levels and most of the world's population lives near sea level.
Due to the above, I'm rather skeptical about most proposals to limit global warming. The data isn't there to justify the expenditures, especially considering that (1) sooner or later, climate change will happen naturally sooner or later and (2) if global warming will happen, it will probably have a net benefit on many countries' economies.
WRT (1), yes "climate change will happen", but the rate of change is unprecendented and we may well not survive it. WRT (2) see my previous comment about drowning lowlands. Your country's economy may do well, but billions may literally die so you can have that wealth.
I'd rather see the money spent on tasks with a more tangable benefit. We know what will happen if we spend $1M to set aside a wildlife area. We don't know what will happen if we spend $1M to put X units of CO2 under the sea floor.
And if your wildlife area becomes a desert in 50 years, your $1M has been completely wasted.
Right now, we have a lot of different computer programs that claim to show us the future. Not one of them can start with the known conditions of fifty years ago and end up with today.
Of course it is not going to be "exact" - this is a chaotic system we are talking about here. Here is a page that discusses the accuracy of the models in detail, including how they are validated and refined.
I've heard, recently, that there's so much forrest, agraculture and so-on in the USA that it's taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere faster than it's putting it in, but I don't have a cite for it.
They probably had a better education, but are so socially inept that even the best of them have had difficulty dealing with life.
By way of contrast, a friend of mine who home schooled her 4 boys has a joke about this: "Sure we worked on socialization: once a month I would take them in the bathroom and steal their allowance."
FWIW, her kids are some of the nicest most well-adjusted young people I know (and that includes one who is autistic.) So be careful making generalizations like this.
All the world's major philosophies are based on a negation of one of these laws Capitalism violate law 1, socialism violates law 2 and mysticism violate law 3.
Oh, and they are also the three laws of thermodynamics...
Isaac Asimov's The End of Eternity dealt with this in 1957.
John Brunner's Times Without Number put forward this solution in 1962.
By contrast, Niven's essay is in All the Myriad Ways published in 1971. Niven is fun to read, but he is not very deep (I just finished rereading Ringworld so I'm not just idly flaming.)
Making giant solar panels which turn sunlight into energy at less efficiency than plants, then waste most of it in transmission and storage overhead is ultimately not going to win.
I'm sorry, but this is nonsense. Most plants are about 15% efficient on a good day. Commercial solar panels are available with twice this efficiency and lab crystals with over 60% efficiency have been grown.
Even worse, current human energy usage is 400 times the carbon fixing ability of the biosphere. 400 times! At this scale, Biodiesel and all these other biosphere harvesting technologies are not simply small potatoes - they are lost in the noise.
By contrast, solar radiation is currently at least two orders of magnitude over current consumption. Nuclear options (including geothermal if reactors give you the willies) are not constrained by the "efficiency" of plants either and can scale. But biosphere harvesting is not going to cut it.
The only reason oil is at 50$ per barell is due to it's massive scale, if waste based oils had even a hundreth of the scale that our current oil industry uses, or even a thousandth of the money, industry and investment it does, we would probably see prices drop well below the 50$ mark.
That is unfortunately a very big if. We are currently burning 400x (that's right, 400x) the amount of carbon that the biosphere fixes annually. Waste-based oil is not just below the scale of extracted oil - it is lost in the noise! The only fuel sources that can replace oil are solar (two orders of magnitude on current energy usage), nuclear, geothermal and tidal. (These are gross categories - for example, wind is a solar fuel source.)
This is not to say that the technology here is useless - far from it - but it is not a fuel source. Think of it as a form of recycling that is far cheaper (and less disgusting) than just dumping it somewhere (hog farm waste lagoons, anyone?)
It's not botulinum toxin, but it IS some pretty nasty stuff to have in you.
Sure, but there is a lot of hysterical ranting out there about how it is "the most toxic substance known to man", which is why there is a certain amount of hyperbole in the other direction.
Another source on Plutonium toxicity and public health risks can be found on the Lawrence Livermore web site. In the section "Plutonium in the Atmosphere" the authors write:
...one ten-thousandth of a gram (0.1 milligram) inhaled can cause cancer. This is correct: we have already estimated that 0.08 milligrams inhaled will have 100% probability of causing a fatal cancer. To inhale 0.1 milligram of plutonium, however, a person would have to inhale more than seven hundred thousand particles. (A single 0.1-milligram particle would have a diameter of over 260 micrometers, about 90 times too big to be readily inhaled.)
So while inhaling it is extremely dangerous, it appears that suspending that amount of Pu in a form that could be completely inhaled would be difficult. So as an individual risk, inhalation seems unlikely, but as a public health risk (cancers in the population instead of cancers in you) it is a significant problem (the most significant non-explosive thread they explore).
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"You will always have the poor among you" - John 12:8
What the GP is trying to point out is that current consumption of hydrocarbons is 400x the current capacity of the biosphere. Not only does bio not scale, your "100% bio" would produce only .0025% of current energy needs (and no, that is not a typo).
The point of thermal depolymerization is waste disposal, not energy production. It simply doesn't scale to an energy supply. But as a way of turning fairly toxic agricultural waste (think pig farm "lagoons") it is a fabulous idea.
I agree that it seems plausible, but there are a lot of factors influencing hurricane formation (e.g. wind shear keeps them from forming in the South Atlantic most of the time).
It is tempting to want Mother Nature to bash some sense into the right wingnuts in Florida, but I suspect that the melting of Greenland (which is happening faster than the models predict) will do that RSN.
Volcanos only contribute a few percent to the carbon budget.
Sheesh, what a bunch of whiners.
"Kids these days are so lazy."
"Ooooh, scary hackers! We must be thinking!!"
"Ooooh, scary terrorists! We must be thinking even harder!!!"
If these guys want a better future, they should get off their collective butts, stop bullying the government and everybody else to give them a guaranteed return on their investments and do it themselves. I mean, isn't that their philosophy?
But the people who will really be hit badly by this are places like Bangladesh. Most of the world's population lives near sea level and a rise of this magnitude (which is already under way) would kill millions of people. Remember the tsunami last year? Indonesia has about 1 billion people. Imagine that the people who survived had nowhere to go and you are starting to get the magnitude of the problem.
And the editors have no dates. So they see the phrase "Low-Hanging Moon" and it sort of eats their brains.
This is true for studies funded by the energy industries, but not for independent researchers. And if you think that independent researchers are "under pressure" to produce pro-warming results, then why are so many energy industry grants going begging? (And as for criticism being easy to find, criticism of just about anything is easy to find - insert your favorite conspiracy theory here. Intelligent criticism is much harder to come by.)
Sure, these are policy/value questions. But consider that the consequences of global warming include rising sea levels and most of the world's population lives near sea level.
WRT (1), yes "climate change will happen", but the rate of change is unprecendented and we may well not survive it. WRT (2) see my previous comment about drowning lowlands. Your country's economy may do well, but billions may literally die so you can have that wealth.
And if your wildlife area becomes a desert in 50 years, your $1M has been completely wasted.
FWIW, her kids are some of the nicest most well-adjusted young people I know (and that includes one who is autistic.) So be careful making generalizations like this.
Believe it or not, it was originally imported for its nutritional value. The root has been used as a starch for millennia in the orient.
All the world's major philosophies are based on a negation of one of these laws Capitalism violate law 1, socialism violates law 2 and mysticism violate law 3.
Oh, and they are also the three laws of thermodynamics...
Isaac Asimov's The End of Eternity dealt with this in 1957.
John Brunner's Times Without Number put forward this solution in 1962.
By contrast, Niven's essay is in All the Myriad Ways published in 1971. Niven is fun to read, but he is not very deep (I just finished rereading Ringworld so I'm not just idly flaming.)
A witty remark is not an argument. - Voltaire
Even worse, current human energy usage is 400 times the carbon fixing ability of the biosphere. 400 times! At this scale, Biodiesel and all these other biosphere harvesting technologies are not simply small potatoes - they are lost in the noise.
By contrast, solar radiation is currently at least two orders of magnitude over current consumption. Nuclear options (including geothermal if reactors give you the willies) are not constrained by the "efficiency" of plants either and can scale. But biosphere harvesting is not going to cut it.
This is not to say that the technology here is useless - far from it - but it is not a fuel source. Think of it as a form of recycling that is far cheaper (and less disgusting) than just dumping it somewhere (hog farm waste lagoons, anyone?)
Tin tin's finest hour!
This may be a troll (see one of the other responses) but for once it is also funny, insightful and on topic.
Another source on Plutonium toxicity and public health risks can be found on the Lawrence Livermore web site. In the section "Plutonium in the Atmosphere" the authors write:
So while inhaling it is extremely dangerous, it appears that suspending that amount of Pu in a form that could be completely inhaled would be difficult. So as an individual risk, inhalation seems unlikely, but as a public health risk (cancers in the population instead of cancers in you) it is a significant problem (the most significant non-explosive thread they explore).